Thoughts on Business Intelligence

I believe that many of the BI developers, practitioners, and manager are unintelligent about Business Intelligence (BI). The purpose of this site is to help make the industry more intelligent.
There is already a great deal of information available for our chosen industry. This site will work to provide commentary on the industry and assistance finding the most important articles available.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

Surveying the BI Salary Surveys

Ever wonder if you are compensated appropriately for your work as a BI professional? Below is some salary information I've gleaned from various sites and consolidated for your convenience.

Computerworld's Smart Salary Tool 2006 shows Data Warehousing Managers at $116,452 in 2006, a 4.17% increase of 2005. Be wary, since the job description was a bit general: "Develops and implements information management strategies. Coordinates and manages information management solutions. Manages all aspects of the warehouses such as data sourcing, migration, quality, design and implementation." Another reason to be suspicious: the sample size is quite low (i.e., approximately 37.)

Aetna to offer patients access to online data. If you're not in healthcare, don't read this article. I'll quote the most interesting / BI related item for your convenience: "An analytic engine developed by Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management Inc. will analyze daily the information in [a database with patient data in it] and notify a patient if anything in the data falls out of line with commonly accepted best practices, said Robert Heyl, architect manager of Aetna’s E-Health business unit. For example, he said, if a physician prescribes a medication that would have an adverse reaction with medicine prescribed by another doctor, a patient would be called and e-mailed about the potential problem." That's cool. BI and Data Mining doing some serious good.

Stat of the Week: 1/1/2007

It's no wonder. Google houses the text of nearly every site on the web. That's big. Now, consider response time of that giant database. For example, the query for business intelligence returns in 73 hundredths of a second. That's fast.

If Google can return queries against the entire World Wide Web in less than 1 second, surely the average Data Warehouse can perform better than it does. Though most of us do not have 175,000 computers at our disposal, we do have clustering, indexes, aggregate navigation, and other mechanisms that can substantially improve performance. "Too much data." can no longer be the response to "Why don't my query run faster?"